With just 48 hours remaining until the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s Australian debut, the promotion this evening announced a couple major changes to the fight card.

Anthony Perosh replaces ill Ben Rothwell in a UFC 110 main-card fight with Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic, and a shoulder injury suffered by Elvin Sinosic has forced the cancellation of his preliminary-card bout with fellow Australian Chris Haseman.

UFC 110 takes place Saturday at Acer Arena in Sydney, Australia.

The night’s main card, including the Filipovic vs. Perosh bout, airs on pay-per-view.

Details of Rothwell’s (30-7 MMA, 0-1 UFC) illness were not disclosed. Stepping in the IFL veteran’s place is Perosh (10-5 MMA, 0-2 UFC), a 37-year-old Australian who returns to his UFC for the first time since his 0-2 stint in the promotion in 2006. Since the losses to Jeff Monson and Christian Wellisch, Perosh has fought primarily for Australia’s popular Cage Fighting Championships promotion and has posted a 5-2 record. All of the wins have come via stoppage.

Perosh faces the biggest-name opponent of his career in Filipovic (25-7-2 MMA, 2-3 UFC), who recently snapped a three-fight win streak with a TKO loss to Junior dos Santos at UFC 103 in September.
Once one of the world’s most feared heavyweight strikers, Filipovic is now desperately in need of a win.

Sinosic (8-11-2 MMA, 1-6 UFC) and Haseman (20-16 MMA, 0-1 UFC), meanwhile, earned their spots on the UFC 110 card largely because of their pasts as MMA trailblazers in Australia. While neither has had much success in recent years, the bout garnered some interest from local fight fans, who first saw the pair meet at a 1997 Caged Combat event. The bareknuckle fight saw Haseman earn the win by driving his chin into Sinosic’s left eye until he tapped due to the now-illegal submission.

UFC officials opted to pull the card from the lineup rather than naming a replacement on such short notice.

The full UFC 110 card now includes:

MAIN CARD

Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira vs. Cain Velasquez

Michael Bisping vs. Wanderlei Silva

George Sotiropoulos vs. Joe Stevenson

Ryan Bader vs. Keith Jardine

Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic vs. Anthony Perosh

PRELIMINARY CARD

Stephan Bonnar vs. Krzysztof Soszynski

Brian Foster vs. Chris Lytle

C.B. Dollaway vs. Goran Reljic

Igor Pokrajac vs. James Te Huna

For complete coverage of UFC 110, stay tuned to the UFC Rumors section of MMAjunkie.com.

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